Category: Links Round-Ups

Happy Friday, friends! When my alarm went off this morning I lay in bed for two (2) minutes wishing not to get up, and I only successfully did get up by reminding myself that I can sleep late tomorrow. I AM SO TIRED. But here are some good links for you to enjoy.

Millennial culture is this Twitter thread. (Major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi contained herein.)

Amal El-Mohtar is taking over for NK Jemisin writing an SFF column for the New York Times Book Review. Two excellent reviewers for an excellent column! What a world!

Some elements of the trailer for The Shape of Water made me suspicious, and I decided not to see it. Elsa Sjunneson-Henry (who did see it) explores the film’s failures of disability representation. (One amazingly easy improvement would have been to cast a disabled actress in the main role.)

Jezebel gets to the heart of the thing (well one of the things) that made me uncomfortable about that Aziz Ansari thing. Here’s some additional thoughts (both about the thing itself and conversations around the thing, with lots of good links) from the Lakshmi and Asha Show.

Ijeoma Oluo has the conversation about race with her mom that she’s been dreading. You should preorder her book cause it looks like it’s going to be really good.

I hope y’all are all staying warm this week! Have a wonderful weekend with lots of reading!

Oops, the holidays happened and I forgot to post links round-ups. I know you have all been suffering terribly without them. My hope is that you improved the shining hour by catching up on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Good Place, my two favorite shows on TV. But if you just moped around a-waiting, here’s the goods at last.

Nikole Hannah-Jones continues to do incredible work on school segregation in the US, and this interview at the Atlantic is fuego. When she writes a book, when that day comes, I am going to buy 29 copies of it and distribute them to a bunch of people.

And by the way, I’m not linking it, but there’s a Washington Post article making the rounds about how maybe Logan Paul did some good by drawing attention to the suicide problem in Japan. Among other things, it implies that media guidelines for reporting on suicide (which are based in research about suicide contagion) are similar in quality to the culture of shame and silence around suicide in Japan. It makes me want to punch a wall. It’s less harmful for the media to say nothing than it is for them to report irresponsibly (as they consistently do). I am wrath.

I’d say that I am currently at peak excitement for The Last Jedi, but it’s impossible to say with any certainty. As we draw ever closer to Star Wars Day (the 15th but actually for me probably the 16th), I likely will grow ever more excited until I see the movie or explode, whichever comes first. So let’s start this week’s round-up with some Kelly Marie Tran news.

Okay, good. We are all happy now, about Kelly Marie Tran. Now back to dismantling the patriarchy. (PS Kelly Marie Tran being in Star Wars is also dismantling the patriarchy, thanks Kelly Marie Tran, we owe you.)

“Many men will absorb the lessons of late 2017 to be not about the threat they’ve posed to women but about the threat that women pose to them.” Rebecca Traister on all this sexual assault business.

Comedians have to get over themselves, says Drew Magary. And he attacks that awful trope of shitty, offensive comedians being truth-tellers, THANK CHRIST.

How Get Out inspired a UCLA course on horror and racism. Get Out is a movie I have seen, and it is very frightening and has lots of creepy, clever little Easter eggs for, like, critical race theory nerds. (I’m kidding.) (Sort of.)

Welp, another Friday, another week of sexual assault revelations. Since I’m guessing some of y’all are tired of reading even quite excellent cultural commentary about sexual predators, I’m going to split these links up for you. Here’s the ones that don’t contain any sexual assault:

It’s the year of our Lord 2017, and we are just now publishing the first translation of the Odyssey by a woman. (Buy it! The physical book is really beautiful!)

I’m really tired this Friday. My week’s been fine, but I’m coming out of it feeling exhausted and discouraged, for no real reason I can identify. I wish my stupid period would start, as I guess that is maybe the reason I am feeling crummy. These are some links. Very good ones, I think!

“Every comment allowed to pass, every rapist defended by friends and family and strangers, every man afraid of being falsely accused, creates a culture saying, ‘We have your back when you harm women.'” Natalie Degraffinried on how badly we need men to take on accountability for rape culture.

“Let’s be dragons together”: Maureen Ryan on her sexual assault by a TV executive and the (lack of) fall-out.

And (last Harvey Weinstein thing) the typically brilliant Bim Adewunmi on sexual harassment, black women, and being in the room where it (movie, assault) happens.

Well, okay, one more tangentially Harvey Weinstein thing: Soraya Chemaly on what we teach girls when we enforce dress codes.

Happy Friday the 13th, friends! Hopefully it brings you good luck, not bad. I’m having a strange, emotional week, but it includes a lot of wonderful friends whom I get to vigorously embrace, so that bit’s good. Have some links!

Hi friends it is Friday but I have a Thing on Saturday that I’m terrified about, so Friday is no relief to me at all. Come Saturday night I will be relieved, and then not too long after that I have a vacation, and that will be very lovely indeed. In the meantime, have some links.

Mallory Ortberg’s piece about trying a binder for the first time is immensely lovely and moving (though also quite melancholy).

I will always share stories about people loving Latin. Always. Here’s one!

There was a dumb article in the New York Times about romance novels that you shouldn’t read. Instead, you can just read this response to it! (Okay, and you can read the article itself; it’s linked herein.)

Okay, full disclosure, in a bid to make my watch of Black Sails last longer, I have been reading a lot of pirate books in the evenings. I checked out I think fifteen of them from my library, and that’s not counting the ones I own from the last time I got interested in pirates. So I haven’t had as much time to compile links for you. I’ve made up for it by including the very very best links.

First up, the Book Smugglers are running a Kickstarter so that they can continue to do what they do and pay more dollars to diverse SFF creators. They’re an incredible publisher and resource, and you should support them. Do it do it do it!

Once you’ve done that, if you have dollars left over, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is raising money for a feature film! You can donate there as well if you want to see Phryne’s fabulous wardrobe and Jack’s strangely seductive inability to stand up straight on your screens again.

Boys in college predictably were always trying to get me to watch Boondock Saints, a movie I was confident I would loathe. So this brutal Nathan Rabin piece about its director brought tears of joy to my eyes. (I have still never seen Boondock Saints.)

Taylor Swift and medieval studies have the same problem: Nazis love them. Both of them need to do something about it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the queen of school resegregation reporting, has a new piece up at the New York Times about how southern school districts are resegregating through secession. Basically southern schools are beginning to follow the northern blueprint of separating school systems at the metropolitan, rather than the parish (county) level.

God actually blessed us with a new Nikole Hannah-Jones piece and a new Ta-Nehisi Coates piece in the same week. Here’s Coates on Trump and white supremacy.

One of the most persistent and damaging cultural myths about sexual assault is that the people who commit it are uniquely evil—that they are not the same as the people you are friends with, or related to, or dating, or a fan of, the people that you trust or that you like.

Rembert Browne is typically brilliant on the subject of Colin Kaepernick and what white America expects of black folks it loves.

Sorry this was short, and I wish you a very happy weekend! My Saints will be playing the Partytots, so I anticipate a grim ending to mine. May your teams all win.

Hi everyone. Hi hello. I know I have not been answering your lovely comments or visiting your lovely blogs in the manner to which you have become accustomed. I’m sorry. I have been undergoing some life changes this summer, and although they are good ones, I have now been in flux for the greater part of four months, and I am reaching the end of my ability to cope with change. Or new information. Or new books. Or hobbies I enjoy, such as blogging. I am anxious like my head is full of bees. I am worried about the storm, and the Nazis, and whether the revised version of my life that I have taken some trouble to construct this summer will shortly come crashing down around my stupid, change-courting ears.

Anyway, not that anyone was sitting at home like “huh where is Jenny,” but that is where I have been. Undergoing changes and fretting about them. Not reading very much. I am not at my best, but also (ofc) feeling extremely guilty for not being at my best. Like who am I that I deserve to have days — entire weeks actually! — when I am not at my best? NOBODY, THAT’S WHO.

Oh, you know what’s a book I did read? I read a picture book about a girl who never makes mistakes. I loved it at once and it was #lifegoals but then, can you believe, as the book goes on, the girl makes an enormous, a genuinely mortifying mistake that would scar a real child for life; or if not that, then it would surely create in her a renewed desire to, from there on out, achieve perfection in all things. But in this NONSENSE PICTURE BOOK, do you know what happens? She resigns herself to making mistakes sometimes. HAH. The little girl in the picture book is WEAK and took the COMPLETELY WRONG LESSON away from her awful, humiliating error. What a terrible book.

Extremist hate groups understood online platforms in a fundamental way long before the New York Times cottoned on, reports New York Times writer who doesn’t listen to black women on Twitter. (I’m being snarky, but this article makes some interesting points about how online platforms function, which is why I’m sharing it.)

MUMSY DO NOT CLICK THIS NEXT LINK. I WANT TO TELL YOU THIS STORY MYSELF. Everyone else, definitely click this next link. Okay Mumsy it is all right, I have now told you this story. Click away.

Watching the YA community doggedly figure out why Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give got bumped down to number two on the NYT Bestseller List by a book nobody had ever heard of was frankly magical. Here’s a YA literary agent breaking down why this story was so bonkers.

Speaking of scams, here’s an author who has lied about pretty much everything, including I SWEAR TO GOD making up an agent, building that fictional agent a website, and using a picture of Ian Somerhalder for that agent’s face. What is this world.